“The Idea that Everything from Spoons to Stones is Conscious is Gaining Academic Credibility” Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
Hildegard of Bingen wrote that “no creature lacks an interior life” which is another way of talking about the same reality.
The Cosmic Christ archetype after all names the “light in all things” (photons are light waves in every atom) as a sacred presence; and Eckhart, borrowing from Muslim philosopher Avicenna, talks frequently about the “spark of the soul”– a concept found richly developed by the Sufi mystics but also by Jewish mystics in the Kaballah.
There, the sparks touch and even ignite Wisdom herself who accompanies creation and play a role in the unfolding of creation itself. They play in the elements of the universe—fire, air, water, and earth, “from which evolved the states of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human,” as Zohar scholar Daniel Matt comments.
Matthew Fox’s meditation on Rupert Sheldrake’s article, “Is the Sun Conscious?” As traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the ‘panpsychist’ view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists….
Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an ‘unimaginably simple’ form of consciousness, says Goff.
There may well be “some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.”
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